Reminiscent of the do-it-yourself approach of the Riot Grrrl movement, this Spring two feminist provocateurs are taking their multimedia show on the road. Mary Billyou and Sabine Gruffat are hailing from Brooklyn, NY and Madison, WI to present "The Free Translators" touring east coast cities and towns with a program of radical videos and performances.

As the title suggests, The Free Translators' video program is inspired by widely accessible texts. The artists perform in many of their own videos, sometimes enacting the news, dictating words written by the Marquis de Sade, or excerpting from Virginia Woolf's anti-war essays. By re-interpreting the texts for the audience, the videos explore notions of identity and communication, re-imagining issues raised by feminist consciousness, the quality of attention today in the midst of multiple authorial references, and the diminished space of citizenship around the monologue of mass media.

In between video screenings, The Free Translators present two "Live Tactical Translations," or, live multimedia experiments inspired by 1970s feminist art and Soviet avant-garde news troupes. Culling from their library of text, sound, and image, alter egos Miss Reading and Miss Recognition communicate through matching headsets and manipulate analog recordings as they educate audiences in their unique methods of reading and comprehension.[CONTINUED]